Picnic

On Friday we had our annual Antaranga picnic. Of course when I say "picnic" I usually picture a park with grass and a blanket and paper plates. Well I suppose you could call the location a park, though really it's just public land like a lot of the land here is, and there certainly isn't any grass though there's a good amount of dirt (brown is the general color of the scenery here... well the general color of everything, actually)and while there are no paper plates they do have plates made out of dead leaves held together with bamboo. It is off these plates we ate out rice and mustard dall with our fingers (that's right, EVERYTHING is finger food here. None of this setting the forks on the left and spoons on the right nonsense). The kids had a blast. I separated them into two groups and got a couple games of duck, duck, goose going, granted for them it was cocur, cocur, bidal (Bengali for dog, dog, cat. Honestly, they were just the first animals that came to mind so that's what we used. I'm not sure if they even have Geese here...)Jocey started teaching the kids how to waltz, we had piggy-back races (Sean won every single one, of course, even when we put the bigger kids on his backs) and it was a huge hit. I taught them "bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish" and you would think I was showing them a sunset for the first time ever they got so excited. We even had a dance party. All the kids from the school came on a bus and so some teenagers that came we able to convince me to climb up on the bus to dance with them there. A little crazy, sure, but hey what's life without a little bit of dancing on buses?

As for other matters, Linea and I found an Indian bakery near the supermarket. To be honest, most of the sweets here taste like vaguely sugary cardboard, but there are these yellow cookies that are AMAZING (hence the picture above). I'm determined to try every single sweet in the bakery before I leave.

There's a whole slew of animals here, but most importantly there are three dogs that come into our yard on a regular basis. They must all be brothers because they look essentially exactly the same: emaciated, small, black and white. It is for this reason Caleb and Josh have named them Oreo 1, Oreo 2, and Oreo 3. Way to be creative, guys. I can't tell them apart but Caleb and Josh are convinced that they can (I don't believe them at all)and the picture is of Oreo 2. We're not supposed to actually touch the animals here because they carry diseases, but Caleb finds other ways of petting them (hence the leaf).

Teaching is going well, though the younger kids are still having difficulty with the sounds. "No, h does not say 'ssssssssssssss....'" But we're making progress, and it feels fabulous to have students again :) I know I'm not supposed to have favorites, but there is one girl I really love in the third grade named Nikart (above) who gets super into the games. Except for when she's not called on or she has to wait a long time for her turn, in which case she gives me a look where her eyes get all big and she sticks out her lower lip and she looks vaguely like a dog. And really, who could not snap under such an adorable facial expression?